Do you remember this Echo & the Bunnymen song:

Here am I
home at last with a golden view
Looking for hope
and I hope it's you....

I'm here in heaven. Taking my coffee with Kim Stafford. Doing my workshops in my cabin. Our bedroom deck is ten feet from a rushing whitewater river. The river runs to the huge Wallowa lake where salmon and trout want it to stay cold and clear. Snowy mountain peaks surround us. The kids wake up slow--except Chayo who is in a kids' hiking/writing workshop, so she's gone by 8:30. The big kids crawl from their beds and get in my bed to go back to sleep. They're exhausted from only sleeping 13 hours yesterday. Cinderella and I straighten up the cabin and put on the coffee and grab some cherries or cereal. The Oregon cherries--well! Perhaps that's all you need to say at this point: Oregon cherries. At 9:00, my writers make their way from the main lodge to the cabin, carrying lightning and fire...perhaps a little bullshit, too. We're writers. Prone to b.s. on some days. What's it like here? Yesterday, a deer met me out on the dirt road. He walked up to me and sniffed my hand. Then he walked beside me through the woods. Then the li'l bugger tried to come in the front door with me. And the rangers had put out a bear alert--this bear seems to want to learn to write and lounges around the workshops thinking up poems.

Why, again, am I going back to Illinois?
Wish U were here,
L

# posted by Luis @ 10:33 AM